laptop or desktop?
For what purpose?
What price range?
I'm thinking a desktop. Just for gaming and surfing the net. And some work. Like getting pics and vids from construction jobsites.
This company makes the best custom PCs for gaming.
Alienware - Custom Gaming Computers - PC Gaming At Its Best
Go to Walmart, they sell desktops cheap because they're being phased out, sometime in the near future, desktops will be obsolete.
Go to Walmart, they sell desktops cheap because they're being phased out, sometime in the near future, desktops will be obsolete.
This company makes the best custom PCs for gaming.
Alienware - Custom Gaming Computers - PC Gaming At Its Best
Okay so gaming.
Processor:
Best price vs what you get is the i5 processor. The i5-4670k is considered the biggest bang for the buck and you can overclock the hell out of it. Now if you are not going to overclock, then the i5-4570 processor.
Motherboard:
This is a tricky one, depending if you are going to overclock or not. Personally I would go for a 1150 socket (Haswell motherboard) H87 (more USB 3.0) for non overclocking or a Z87 chipset motherboard for overclocking. You can spend a lot on a motherboard, but in reality the cheapest ones are often just as good as the expensive ones for most people. Just make sure that you have 4 sockets for ram and a few PCI slots.. some real cheap ones only have 2 sockets and no PCI slots.. bad idea. You have Asus, Asrock, Gigabyte and MSI as the big guns in this area.. all are proven good brands. I would not spend more than 100 bucks on a motherboard.
Ram:
Go for 1600+ mhz ram.. Kingston has there Hyper X and it is good. 4 GB is fine, 8 is better.
SSD/Harddrives:
Any SSD that can do at least 500 mb/s read and write is just fine. Samsung and Cruical make some good ones and are relatively cheap. 120 GB version is a minimum and only use it for the OS and programs. If you want to use it for games as well, then it might need to be bigger depending on the size of the games. Buy a 1TB+ ordinary drive for general storage and even games. Few games actually benefit that much from an SSD.
Graphics card:
This is where you can buy yourself into the poor house... by far the most expensive part of the computer ironically.
Best Graphics Cards For The Money: June 2014
has a good rundown depending on how much you want to spend.
First off desktops wont be obsolete.. ever.
Secondly places like Walmart sell them cheap because they are mostly last years model, with cheap components.
Couldn't the same be said of other companies who sell desktops? Such as bestbuy, tiger direct, and so forth? The desktop you buy today is either last year models or even worse, refurbished?
For RAM I got 8 instead of 4, but then again we need to know what kind of gaming this guy does, smaller games or huge games that take lots of power.
Yes if they are cheap. Only places you get this years model is at places like Dell or by buying the bits yourself or by requesting them built at a store that does it.
I've been thinking about getting a new computer.
Any tips or heads up suggestions would be very much appreciated.
I've been thinking about getting a new computer.
Any tips or heads up suggestions would be very much appreciated.
I had a buddy that purchased a top of the line Dell which turned out to be an absolute piece of junk. I've also heard other complaints about Dell too, much like lack of customer support type complaints.
To be honest, 4 GB ram is fine for most (especially if you have an SSD for the OS and programs), and here the graphics card and amount of ram on it is more important. The higher ram is only really important for picture/video editing and big database runs and such things.
Graphics card does play a huge role. I do edit videos and such, Starcraft automatically saves every rematch and allows for playback and more.
I still think it would just be helpful for us if the guy simply told us a little more than "I do gaming and stuff".
At the end of the day I just hope the guy gets an optimal computer that is the right price instead of getting one too weak and one with way more power than needed.